hello world!

So here’s a little preface. I’m Andrea. I’m a senior in high school, and it’s January, which means almost all of my obligations are done—I just need to keep up my grades + whatever extracurricular involvement. Honestly, these two things are probably a very decent chunk of my time, but it’s not all of it. So, I’m starting this little dev-log to document the iterating I’m doing to the system that is me. I have three big prongs to this, with little sub-prongs:

1. Self-improvement

• Confidence and public speaking
• Rationality
• Learning
• Mental and physical health
• Time with friends, family

2. Direct-service

• Volunteering
• Accessibility

3. Public reflection

• Substack
• Logs
• Information writing

Now, I could get into the nitty-gritty on the sub-prongs forever, but for now, I’m keeping it simple. I hope to optimize for one of the big prongs at least 90% of my free-time throughout this semester. I've already made a good first start: creating this log! I plan to share the link around with only a few close friends to begin with (if you're reading this, you're probably one of them). It's pretty cool, actually--I'm typing in a Markdown file right now!

Anyway. Besides starting this log, here are some other, concrete things I deigned to do:

• Volunteer @ Claremont Care (where my grandma is staying)
• Get a job at Mathnasium or adjacent. Teaching kids, yay!
• Keep up w/ rationality methods & biology reading. Also, keep reading before bed. That right there is my holy time.

I'm pretty excited for all of these things! I'll get to work as soon as I wrap up the final college application things I have to do.

I'm also going to end all of these personal logs with this little section:

What problems have I encountered? What have I learned?

One thing that I have noticed myself doing is being unclear with intention. Going forward, I want to really understand why I'm doing something. Is it really for myself or for some external pressure I would be better off avoiding? I haven't really looked into ways to implement this better into my daily life besides just asking myself why I'm doing a certain action. In my head, I'm always optimizing for something, but it's kind of foggy. And maybe it's okay for it to be foggy, but I'd at least like to clear my immediate surroundings. I hope, in foggy world, starting this little log will bring me a bit of clarity.

Anyway that's kind of it for Day 1. I'm excited to see how I do better tomorrow :) (I'll probably update this whenever I can. I'll try for daily, but sometimes, it might end up being closer to weekly. I'll also think about this throughout the day, which will hopefully make me more mindful and aware, one of the problems I noted earlier.)

(P.S. I recommend this playlist for all of your sunny wintry January days.)

_(P.P.S. can you tell I'm not the most detail-oriented person from the amount of mistakes in my logs that I'm too lazy to go back and fix? inconsistencies aplenty....)intention

(P.P.P.S. I still think there's too much friction between blogging and posting with my current method. I have to 1) boot up VSCode, 2) write post in markdown file, 3) commit all changes. Which is a lot harder than Substack: 1) open substack writing, 2) write and post. I should figure smth out about that some other day. For today, sleep!)